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[-] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 32 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

If we're talking about just using em-dashes and ellipses, yeah. But there are tells, like em-dashes or ellipses in... weird spots, where a human would never use them. Anyways, they also use "anyways" after not going on tangents all the time—and they have an unquenchable thirst for ending a passage with a pithy one-liner.

They haven't beaten the Turing test yet.

[-] 30p87@feddit.org 11 points 4 days ago

I very rarely even see em dashes in regular text. I wouldn't know how to type them on neither my PC nor my phone (the latter at least not intuitively) anyway. I always use -, and assumed en and em dashes were only used in books and such, where you also use lots of different fonts, sizes, »« instead of „“/"", etc. If you truly want an artistic pause that is longer than '-'... just use ....

[-] 9point6@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago* (last edited 3 days ago)

I've always used em dashes when writing casual speech style writing like internet comments, I find it helps things flow a bit better at times.

It's a little annoying that people now see it as an AI tell, but I've not been called one yet

[-] canihasaccount@lemmy.world 4 points 3 days ago

They're trained on scientific writing, and we em dashes all the time in scientific writing.

[-] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 days ago

The em dash as a concept is a relic. People now communicate those uses with a dash between spaces, or with two dashes.

It's like worrying which direction your quotation marks curl. They don't.

[-] wieson@feddit.org 2 points 3 days ago

It's not worrying, it might be foreign to you.

»« is the style of direct speech markers used in German book setting. It's basically mirrored from the French style, who use «»

„“ is the style used in German handwritten texts and quotations

"" is the English style for direct speech and quotations

[-] mindbleach@sh.itjust.works 4 points 3 days ago

In English, distinguishing those two symbols has become an affectation. The straight "" style is all anyone actually types, and it's unremarkable to see that style rendered or printed.

The length of a dash is even less important than that. Any style guide that's insistent about it might as well demand you type movie names in a different font. Can it be done? Sure. Does it have semantic value? Maybe. But the only people who'd care also know how to pronounce LaTeX.

This is the language that abandoned an entire letter because it was hard to print.

[-] itslilith@lemmy.blahaj.zone 2 points 3 days ago

I use them all the time. Long press the dash - on the phone keyboard, or COMPOSE - - - on Linux.

[-] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 days ago

I use em-dashes a lot, I just hit the ?123 button on the bottom left side of my phone keyboard and long-press the hyphen. The thing is, I use em-dashes where a human would use them, I don't sprinkle them on like sentence enhancers

[-] 30p87@feddit.org 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)
-
–
—

Oh yeah

Dash, double dash and triple dash (that's at least what I'd think intuitively)

[-] starman2112@sh.itjust.works 4 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

Hey fr though, the issue is that yes, they're trained on human writing, but that training lacks any context, so you have mfs writing stories like passages out of a fanfic when they're posting on /r/TrueOffMyChest. They also aren't real people, so they can't write genuinely realistic stories; it's always "my neighbor secretly left food in front of my door and I ate it for 2 years without knowing anything about them" and "I drove 2 hours both ways for a job paying $16/hr in San Diego"

this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2025
197 points (93.0% liked)

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